We’re approaching our four year anniversary writing about wine in Woodinville, Washington; Lake Chelan, Washington; and Washington state wine in general, on our occasional field trips to Prosser, Walla Walla and the Tri-Cities area. (Spokane and Vancouver, we hope to visit your wineries next spring!)
Boy have we learned a lot along the way on our wine tasting journeys and adventures! We’ve met lots of wonderful, inspiring and passionate wine loving people (including winemakers, tasting room staff, wine tasters, wine club members and other wine bloggers and wine influencers).
We’ve gotten a lot of help and assistance in the wine industry social media sphere from responsive, friendly, helpful wineries such as Goose Ridge, Rocky Pond Winery, Tsillan Cellars, and DeLille Cellars (all big enough wineries to have dedicated social media staff). We’ve been impressed, too, by how smaller family wineries are active and responsive on social media (such as Armstrong Family Winery and Damsel Cellars.)
We’ve also seen a lot of missed opportunities from small wineries who are super busy; run by passionate but unprofessional wine hobbyists; run by technophobes; not sure how to promote their business; or not familiar with the importance of social media in this day and age.
I was inspired to write this article during a week of attempting to research new autumn wine releases from various wineries in our city. I saw a whole bunch of outdated websites, messaged an unfortunately large number of unresponsive wineries, got frustrated trying to find out recent and accurate info, and was incredibly grateful for those wineries who did have social-media savvy staff on hand who responded quickly and helpfully.
Are you selling enough wine? Yes? Great, I’m happy for you and obviously you don’t need my suggestions from this tiny (cute, dare I say) little wine blog.
But if you aren’t selling enough wine during this challenging time with your tasting rooms closed to indoor service, we think it can’t hurt to encourage people to write nice things about your wine business. We don’t know how much affect any particular wine blogger’s article will have on your wine sales in the immediate future, but we feel strongly it’s important to get positive press, pics of your winery and wines out there for more people to see, and mentions of your winery on social media. Can’t hurt!
Let’s take just a couple minutes to run through some ideas (and I’d love to hear your comments in the comment section below).
- Keep your website updated (and under your own control) and add to it often (events, wine releases, news, pics, etc). Make sure your copyright notice near the bottom of your website says 2020 (or soon, 2021).
- Put your social media channel icons and links on your website (and test them)
- Post quality content to Facebook several times per week, tailored to Facebook
- Post quality content to Instagram several times per week, tailored to Instagram
- Please, please include info on release dates and grapes used on your wine bottle info sheets
- Check your Facebook Page and Instagram DM messages multiple times per workday (or allow notifications to hit your phone)
- Answer social media query messages back promptly (or put an employee in charge of this)
- When emailing wine writers, make your email subject personal so it doesn’t sound like just another winery newsletter (we subscribe to hundreds of them)
- Providing a bottle shots archive of high quality, up-to-date wine bottle pics that wine journalists and wine bloggers are encouraged to use is so helpful!
- Reach out and invite wine bloggers you enjoy reading, to your wine release, new tasting room opening, winery event, etc. Send an invite via social media platforms they are active on, as email often gets buried and seems more impersonal.
- Click “Like” and comment something positive when a blogger posts about your wine or winery on social media platforms or on their blog.
- Click “Like” and comment positively on bloggers’ other pics of nearby wineries and wines that aren’t yours. That’s what makes it “social” media.
- Keep your winery hours updated on your website, Facebook, Google business page, Yelp, etc. (Difficult during this time of ever changing situations, I know!)
Having up-to-date info and being easy to contact and responsive makes it so much easier for wine bloggers to write about your winery and help you, in some small way, sell your wine. Our blogs aren’t about us, they’re about you. Our readers are very interested to know about you and your wine offerings – help us tell them!
-Carrie
